Unless you catch one on sale, you're not walking home with a new Android 3.x (Honeycomb) tablet for less than $400 from a reputable vendor (give or take a few bucks). Most of them run $500 and up. Ever wonder why that is? Back when the iPad was the only game in town, the assumption was that Android tablets would bring affordable slates to the masses. We're starting to see that with pre-Honeycomb tablets, but slates running Google's latest and greatest mobile OS still command a premium. Is that by design?

The army of Android tablets is about to get bolstered by a few more foot soldiers as Archos readies the launch of its G9 tablets. Each of the four tablets will be led by General Honeycomb (Android 3.2), and each one will come packing a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor clocked at 1GHz or higher. Archos says one of its upcoming tablets -- the G9 Turbo -- will debut as the market's first sub-$400 tablet to tote a Texas Instruments OMAP 4 dual-core processor up to 1.5GHz.

Android has only been around for less than three years. In this time, the Linux-based operating system has quite literally gone places, appearing on a wide gamut of devices, from smartphones to e-readers. But it’s difficult to predict its next destination. Digitimes, however, has far too many industry sources for it to refrain from speculating. According to the site, Asus plans to build an Android notebook. Hit the jump for more.

We imagine Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang went on a crazy high-fiving spree when it was first announced that the company's Tegra 2 mobile chipset would power Android Honeycomb tablets. Now that the sales numbers for the tablets are in, however, it seems like all he's left with are sore palms and broken dreams – at least for now.

Asus is trying to do what others so far haven't been able to, which is to knock the iPad off its perch as the most popular tablet PC. Samsung's Galaxy Tab wasn't able to do it, and neither could Motorola's Xoom. RIM's PlayBook held promise, but the lack of email and contacts support for non BlackBerry owners are major omissions. Will the Eee Pad Transformer present the first real challenge to the iPad?

Tucked away in the minutiae of Intel's recent earnings call, were some details of the chips maker's upcoming tablet plans. Intel had been working closely with Nokia on MeeGo. Now that the Finnish company is focusing on Windows Phone 7, Intel is looking to branch out. The platform they're looking to latch onto next is Google's Android operating system.

Motorola might have been the first to market with an Android Honeycomb tablet, but its next tablet could very well be based on Gingerbread instead of the tablet-specific OS. That’s according to an Engadget article detailing Motorola’s plans for an enterprise tablet. Hit the jump for more.

Intel is pulling out all the stops to get a foothold in the mobile and embedded device markets currently dominated by British chip designer ARM. Both the “Oak Trail” Atom platform that Intel began shipping to OEMs a few days earlier and its 32nm successor, codenamed Cloverview, are capable of running Android.

Running Android, however, doesn’t guarantee market success and Intel will need to curry favor with tablet vendors if it hopes to take the attack to ARM. That is precisely what the Santa Clara-based chip maker is rumored to be doing with a new strategy dubbed PRC Plus. So what exactly is this plan all about?

While the full swarm of Honeycomb tablets buzzes further off on the horizon, a few scouts are arriving to test the hospitableness of the consumer environment. Sales of the Motorola Xoom have been sluggish so far, and it may be due to a price that does little to sway potential iPad 2 buyers. The latest experiment in Honeycomb tablet market penetration, the Acer Iconia Tab A500, arrives today at BestBuy.com for pre-orders at a tantalizing sub-iPad price of $449.99. Pre-orders at Best Buy stores will begin on April 14, and the final onsale date will be April 24 -- exclusively at Best Buy stores and online.

The HTC Flyer is facing some pretty stiff competition these days in the tablet space, not just from the iPad 2, but also from Motorola who got a leg up on the Android market by scoring dibs on Honeycomb. Presumably in an attempt to keep sales of the flyer from drying up completely, HTC threw the Flyer community a bone by confirming via twitter that they would indeed update their flagship tablet to Google latest tablet OS “when it’s made available”.